Marc Genton, chair, and distinguished professor of the KAUST Statistics Program, was recently selected as the 2020 Georges Matheron Lecturer of the International Association for Mathematical Geosciences (IAMG).

Gaurav Agarwal, a fourth-year Ph.D. student in KAUST Associate Professor Ying Sun’s Environmental Statistics (ES) research group, recently won the best student paper award at the International Indian Statistical Association (IISA) 2019 Student Paper Competition for his paper titled “Bivariate Functional Quantile Envelopes with Application to Radiosonde Wind Data.”

Joining the faculty of King Abdullah University of Science and Technology (KAUST) six years ago gave statistics Professor Ying Sun a unique career opportunity: the chance to build and lead her own research group solving real-world problems.

This October, Zhuo Qu, a Ph.D. candidate in statistics, along with several of her fellow Statistics (STAT) Program students launched the first-ever American Statistical Association (ASA) student chapter outside of the United States.

Hovering airborne vehicles could connect smart sensors to the internet of things.

Better prediction of extreme winds at sparsely observed locations could help optimize the design of wind farms.

Factors influencing the tolerance of barley to saline soils have been uncovered using an advanced robust statistical technique.

 Ajay Jasra is a professor of applied mathematics and computational sciences who recently joined the KAUST CEMSE Division in July 2019.

New methods for training machine learning models are quicker and more accurate than current approaches, previously considered state-of-the-art.

David Bolin is an associate professor of mathematical statistics who joined the KAUST Computer, Electrical and Mathematical Science and Engineering (CEMSE) Division earlier this month from the Department of Mathematical Sciences at the University of Gothenburg. Before joining KAUST, Bolin received both his Ph.D. degree in mathematical statistics and M.S.c in engineering mathematics from Lund University, Sweden, in 2012 and 2007, respectively. Upon completing his Ph.D., he spent one year at Umeå University, Sweden, working as a postdoctoral fellow before moving to the Chalmers University of Technology. In 2016, Bolin became an associate professor of mathematics at the University of Gothenburg, where a year later he received the title of Docent in mathematical statistics.

Joaquín Ortega Sánchez is an instructional professor of statistics who joins the KAUST CEMSE Division after spending the last sixteen years working at the Mathematics Research Center (CIMAT) in Guanajuato, Mexico. Born in Venezuela, Ortega completed his postgraduate and graduate studies in London, where he studied mathematics at King’s College London, before obtaining his Ph.D. in Probability Theory across the city at Imperial College London. After his time in the U.K., he returned to his native Venezuela where he worked for over 20 years at the Universidad Central de Venezuela, Caracas.   Over the course of his career, Ortega’s research work has focused on stochastic processes, specifically Gaussian processes and time series with applications in oceanography and biostatistics. And more recently his work has focused on functional data analysis.

A deep learning tool could help in structure-based drug discovery.

Areas without earthquake monitoring systems could model the tremors by using data from local landslides.

Deep analysis of the way information is shared among parallel computations increases efficiency to accelerate machine learning at scale.